Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
ISSN: 2327-3798 (Print) 2327-3801 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/plcp21
Prosody and information structure in a tone
language: an investigation of Mandarin Chinese
Iris Chuoying Ouyang & Elsi Kaiser
To cite this article: Iris Chuoying Ouyang & Elsi Kaiser (2015) Prosody and information
structure in a tone language: an investigation of Mandarin Chinese, Language, Cognition and
Neuroscience, 30:1-2, 57-72, DOI: 10.1080/01690965.2013.805795
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2013.805795
Published online: 14 Jun 2013.
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Date: 29 May 2016, At: 13:44
Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 2015
Vol. 30, Nos. 12, 5772, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2013.805795
Prosody and information structure in a tone language: an investigation of Mandarin
Chinese
Iris Chuoying Ouyang* and Elsi Kaiser
Department of Linguistics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA
Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 13:44 29 May 2016
(Received 2 April 2012; final version received 8 May 2013)
Prosody conveys discourse-level information, but the extent to which prosodic cues distinguish different kinds of
information-structural concepts remains unclear. The prosodic encoding of information structure is even more
complicated in tone languages, where acoustic cues such as F0, intensity and duration also distinguish lexical items
(e.g. Mandarin). Prior work on Mandarin led to divergent findings regarding whether and what prosodic cues mark
the distinctions between information-structural types. We conducted a production study on Mandarin to investigate
whether (1) the presence/absence of corrective focus and (2) the distinction between new/given information are
encoded prosodically. Our results show that correctiveness was reflected in all three acoustic parameters: corrective
words had longer durations, larger F0 ranges and larger intensity ranges than non-corrective words. The new-given
distinction was reflected only in lengthening and F0 range expansion, and only in the absence of correction
(correctiveness-by-givenness interaction). This suggests that new information is encoded differently from corrective
focus in Mandarin: only corrective focus is associated with intensity range expansion. Our results provide further
evidence for the multi-functionality of acoustic-prosodic dimensions. Even in a language with lexical tones, which
differ in F0, intensity and duration, all these dimensions also encode information structure. Furthermore, not only
can prosodic cues indicate discourse importance, they also distinguish different types of information structure in
Mandarin. Our findings highlight the fine-grained ability of the language production system to utilise different
aspects of acoustic dimensions with great efficiency.
Keywords: corrective focus; new-information focus; prosodic encoding; intensity range expansion
Introduction
Across languages, it is widely accepted that prosodic
structure can convey discourse-level information (e.g.
Gussenhoven, 1983; Ladd, 1980; Watson, 2010).
Acoustically, there are three dimensions that are
commonly regarded as providing cues about information structure: duration, fundamental frequency (F0)
and intensity. In English, signals of prosodic prominence such as longer duration, changes in F0
movement and greater intensity appear on elements
that are semantically or pragmatically prominent (e.g.
Breen, Fedorenko, Wagner, & Gibson, 2010; Cooper,
Eady, & Mueller, 1985). For instance, consider the
sentence ‘he bought mangos’ in the following contexts:
(1) a. What did Peter buy at the market?
b. He bought mangos (narrow new-information
focus).
(2) a. What did Peter buy at the market? Did he buy
mangos?
b. Yes, he bought mangos (given information).
(3) a. What fruits did you and Peter buy at the
market?
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
b. I bought apples and oranges; he bought mangos (contrastive information).
In response to (1a), mangos in (1b) is new information
that cannot be inferred from the preceding discourse
context. In contrast, the same word mangos in (2b) in
response to (2a) is given information because it has
been mentioned in preceding discourse. When responding to question (3a), mangos in (3b) is contrastive
information: it belongs to the same set (i.e. fruits sold
in the market) as some other information provided in
the previous utterances (i.e. apples and oranges) and
hence creates a contrast. Prior work on English indicates that prosody can distinguish between different
information-structural properties: Katz and Selkirk
(2011) recently show that contrastive focus has stronger
effects than new information on words’ duration, F0
movement and intensity.
While most researchers agree that contrastive focus
and new-information focus are associated with increased duration and intensity, the relationship between F0 contours and different focus types is less well
understood. It has traditionally been argued that
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58
I.C. Ouyang and E. Kaiser
different types of discourse information occur with
distinct pitch accents. Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg
(1990) conclude that the stressed syllables of words in
new-information focus receive an H* pitch accent,
whereas the stressed syllables of words in contrastive
focus receive an LH* pitch accent. However, recent
evidence suggests that the mapping between informationstructural types and pitch accents is not a straightforward one-to-one relation. Watson, Tanenhaus, and
Gunlogson’s (2008b) visual-world eye-tracking study
reveals that listeners look towards contrastive referents
when they hear an LH* pitch accent, whereas
hearing an H* accent leads listeners to consider both
new and contrastive referents. While these findings
confirm that the patterns of F0 movement provide cues
for new-information focus and contrastive focus in
English, Watson et al.’s results also show that newinformation focus and contrastive focus do not map
straightforwardly onto different pitch accents.
Information structure and prosody in Mandarin Chinese
The question of how prosodic cues map on to different
information-structural types becomes even more complex when we consider tone languages, where duration,
F0 and intensity also distinguish between lexical items
(e.g. African languages: Zerbian, Genzel, & Kugler,
2010; Cantonese: Bauer, Cheung, Cheung, & Ng,
2004; Vietnamese: Jannedy, 2007; cross-linguistic discussion: Hartmann, 2007). In Mandarin Chinese, for
example, four pitch patterns commonly referred to as
‘tones’ function as phonemes: high (Tone 1), rising
(Tone 2), low (Tone 3) and falling (Tone 4). They can
alter lexical meaning, as shown in (4). In addition to
the four-way distinction based on F0 movement, lexical
tones in Mandarin also differ in amplitude and length.
Tone 2, Tone 3 and Tone 4 are perceptible solely on the
basis of their amplitude contours (Whalen & Xu,
1992), and Tone 3 is 1.5 times longer than the other
tones when produced in isolation (Xu, 1997).
(4) Tone
Tone
Tone
Tone
1
2
3
4
ma
ma
ma
ma
[High] ‘mother’
[Rising] ‘hemp’
[Low] ‘horse’
[Falling] ‘scold’
Given that intensity, duration and F0 are used to
distinguish lexical items in Mandarin, we are faced with
the question of whether these acoustic dimensions also
function as signals to information structure, and if so,
how they accomplish this dual role. As will become
clear in the rest of this section, existing research on
different information-structural categories in Mandarin has led to divergent results regarding the specifics of
which prosodic cues distinguish different informationstructural categories.
Regarding F0, most researchers agree that in
Mandarin, information structure is conveyed not by
the shapes of F0 contours (as is the case in English), but
rather by their ranges (e.g. Chen & Braun, 2006; Jin,
1996). For example, Chen and Gussenhoven (2008)
found that the F0 shapes specified by different lexical
tones are still distinct from one another within an
information-structural type. This makes sense given
that the shapes of F0 contours are the major cue for
lexical tones in Mandarin, and thus need to be
maintained to ensure successful spoken word recognition. However, if it is the ranges and not the shapes of
the F0 contours that mark information structure in
Mandarin, this means that the approaches based on
data from English (e.g. Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg’s
view that LH* and H* map onto different informationstructural categories) cannot be applied directly to
Mandarin, raising fundamental questions for our understanding of how human languages represent the interface
between prosody and information structure.
Let us now review existing work on how prosody
encodes information structure in Mandarin, starting
with claims regarding new-information focus, as mangos
in (1b), repeated here as (5b). Researchers have
compared words that are new information in narrow
focus to those in broad focus, exemplified in (6). Here,
the entire response in (6b) can be construed as new
information.
(5) a. What did Peter buy at the market?
b. He bought mangos (narrow new-information
focus).
(6) a. What happened?
b. He bought mangos (broad new-information
focus).
Prior research has found that words that are new
information in narrow focus have longer duration (Jin,
1996), larger F0 ranges (Jin, 1996; Xu, 1999) and
higher mean F0 (Chen, Wang, & Xu, 2009), when
compared to words that are new information in broad
focus. The results for intensity in this domain are less
clear: Chen et al. (2009) claim that new information in
narrow focus has a higher mean intensity than new
information in broad focus, but this is not found by Jin
(1996). It is important to note that in general, these
studies compared narrow new-information focus (5b)
and broad new-information focus (6b), rather than
new-information focus and non-focus (i.e. given information). Consequently, their results shed light on
the differences between narrow new-information focus
and broad new-information focus, but do not allow us
to draw conclusions regarding the nature of the
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Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
prosodic differences between focused material and nonfocused (given) material.
The only existing experimental work in Mandarin
that we have seen directly comparing new and given
information (termed ‘rheme’ and ‘theme’ in their study)
is Chen and Braun (2006). They found that new
information has longer duration and larger F0 ranges
than given information. However, their data were
elicited through a reading task where the participants
read questionanswer pairs; to the best of our knowledge, there is no prior work investigating this issue with
a more natural design.
Turning now to contrastive focus, we first need to
point out that most prior work has focused on
corrective focus, as exemplified in (7):
(7) a. What fruit did Peter buy in the market? Did he
buy apples?
b. No, he bought mangos.
Here, mangos in (7b) is corrective information that is
intended to replace the wrong information in a
previous utterance (i.e. apples). Correction is considered to be a subtype of contrastive focus, since it
provides an alternative to some information in the
context (e.g. Dik, 1997). We will refer to this subtype of
contrastive focus as ‘corrective focus’ henceforth. A
number of studies on corrective focus realisation in
Mandarin compared correctively-focused words to
non-focused (given) words embedded in an utterance
that contains some kind of focus, e.g. new-information
focus as in (8), such as Chen (2006), or corrective focus
as in (9), such as Chen and Gussenhoven (2008). Thus,
these studies compared corrective ‘mangos’ in a context
like (7b) to unfocused/presupposed ‘mangos’ in contexts like (8b) or (9b).
(8) a. What did Peter do to the mangos?
b. He bought mangos (new-information focus on
‘bought’).
(9) a. Did John buy mangos?
b. Peter bought mangos (corrective focus on ‘Peter’).
As a whole, these studies found that correctively-focused
words have longer durations (Chen, 2006; Chen &
Gussenhoven, 2008) and larger F0 ranges (Chen &
Gussenhoven, 2008) than non-focused words. This result
fits well with data from other languages as well as the
general intuition that corrective words tend to be more
prominent (in various ways) than words that refer to
already mentioned or presupposed information. However, there seems to be no prior work investigating the
intensity of correctively-focused words in Mandarin.
Some existing Mandarin studies have also compared new-information focus and corrective focus on
59
the other hand, but with conflicting results. Greif
(2010)1 found that correctively-focused words had
longer durations than words in new-information focus,
but did not differ reliably in terms of their F0 ranges.
In contrast, when Chen and Braun (2006)2 compared
corrective focus to new-information focus, they
found differences in F0 ranges but no differences in
duration. Neither Greif (2010) nor Chen and Braun
(2006) looked for differences in intensity between
correctively-focused words and new-information words.
In sum, while existing findings for Mandarin
generally agree that (1) narrow new-information focus
involves increases in F0 displacement and duration
when compared to broad new-information focus and
that (2) corrective focus similarly involves increases in
F0 displacement and duration when compared to
unfocused words, there is as of yet no consensus about
how the two focus types (new-information focus and
corrective focus) differ from each other, nor about how
constituents in new-information focus differs from
non-focused constituents.
In light of the outcomes of Greif (2010) and Chen
and Braun (2006), one might conclude that perhaps
new-information focus and corrective focus do not
differ reliably in their acoustic encoding. However,
because the details of the target sentences, the designs
and the information-structural manipulations in these
two studies differ from each other (because their
general aims were different), we should be careful in
comparing them directly. In essence, then, existing
work has not led to a conclusion about whether and
how corrective focus and new-information focus differ
from each other.
It is quite striking that the prosodic properties of
two major types of information structure that have
received the most attention in research on English (e.g.
Calhoun, 2006; Katz & Selkirk, 2011; Pierrehumbert &
Hirschberg, 1990; Watson et al., 2008b) new information and contrastive focus are not yet well
understood in Mandarin. An understanding of this
question in a cross-linguistic context is important for
theories of information structure. This question relates
to fundamental issues about whether new-information
focus and corrective focus are semantically distinct
categories or variants of the same category, and
whether their prosodic realisations are categorically
different or variants on a continuum (see Watson et al.,
2008b for related discussion).
Aims of this study, predictions
As we saw in the preceding section, it remains unclear
to what extent prosodic cues differentiate one type of
discourse information from another in Mandarin. To
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60
I.C. Ouyang and E. Kaiser
shed light on this issue, and more generally on the
question of how information structure is realised
prosodically in Mandarin, a tone language where all
three prosodic dimensions duration, F0 and intensity
already serve lexical purposes, we conducted a
psycholinguistic production study that investigates
three main questions.
First, do words in new-information focus vs.
corrective focus differ from each other in terms of
their prosodic realisation in Mandarin, and if so, which
parameters (e.g. duration, mean F0, F0 range or
intensity) encode these differences? Second, we also
investigated whether and how the distinction between
‘new’ and ‘given’ influences the acoustic realisation of
both corrective and non-corrective words. As we saw in
the preceding section, prior work does not yield a clear
picture.
Broadly speaking, we expected new information to
be prosodically more prominent than given information in Mandarin, based on existing work in other
languages (Brown, 1983; Fowler & Housum, 1987) as
well as Chen and Braun (2006)’s findings regarding
increased duration and larger F0 ranges.
However, the question of whether and how corrective/contrastive focus differs from new-information
focus is more open. As we saw above, existing work
on Mandarin has not reached a consensus (Greif, 2010
vs. Chen & Braun, 2006). A comprehension experiment
on English by Watson et al. (2008b) found that F0
shapes in English do not map neatly onto contrastive
vs. new-information focus, and a production study by
Katz and Selkirk (2011) further suggests that contrastive focus and new-information focus differ in prosodic
prominence. To contribute to our understanding of this
phenomenon in a cross-linguistic setting, we wanted to
see how and whether the two focus types differ in
Mandarin, a language where discourse-driven prosodic
cuing is constrained by the existence of lexical tone.
The third key aim of our study is a more inclusive
analysis of the acoustic parameters relevant to information structure, to ensure that potentially crucial
distinctions are not inadvertently overlooked. This aim
has two sub-parts:
First, we analysed not only duration and F0 but
also intensity. Prior studies on Mandarin mostly
focused only on duration and F0. The two studies
that did look at intensity (Chen et al., 2009; Jin, 1996)
analysed mean intensity but did not look at potential
effects of information structure on intensity ranges (i.e.
difference between maximum and minimum intensity)
and even in the domain of mean intensity, their
results do not agree with each other. Given that intensity contours, as well as F0 contours, are associated
with lexical tones in Mandarin, we expected that intensity ranges could reflect discourse-level information
just like F0 ranges do. Thus, we investigated how and
whether all three prosodic dimensions encode information structure.
The second sub-part of this third aim has to do with
how F0 range and intensity expansion is accomplished.
Theoretically, there are three possible ways of expanding the range of an excursion: (1) raising the maximum
and lowering the minimum, (2) only raising the
maximum and (3) only lowering the minimum, as
illustrated schematically in Figure 1. If one finds, say,
F0 range expansion for both new-information focus
and corrective focus, then in order to assess whether the
phenomena are really the same or not, we need to
investigate the underlying source of the range expansion, i.e. which of the three ‘strategies’ is being used.
Failing to do this could result in incorrectly grouping
together two phenomena that are underlyingly different. Thus, we conducted detailed analyses not only of
F0 and intensity ranges but also maxima, minima and
means.
Production study: method
To investigate the prosodic encoding of information
structure in a tone language, we conducted a production study on Mandarin. Participants produced instructions based on pictures and arrows shown on a
computer screen. They were told to imagine that
another person in another room would be listening to
their instructions and moving the objects on the screen
accordingly (though this person might sometimes make
mistakes), and that the movements made by the listener
would be visible on the participants’ computer screen.
Using pictures allowed us to avoid presenting participants with written sentences which can result in
unnatural ‘reading’ intonation. In the following subsections, we will first discuss the experimental design
and the stimuli, and then go over the procedure.
In this study, we focus on two major distinctions
between information-structural types: (1) Do new and
corrective elements differ from each other in terms of
their prosodic realisation in Mandarin? (2) Are new
and given elements marked differently in prosody?
Although these kinds of issues have been investigated
(a)
(b)
Figure 1.
Possible ways of expanding ranges.
(c)
Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
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in prior work, the existing results do not yield a clear
picture.
Design and stimuli
Participants saw coloured pictures on the computer
screen. Objects were presented in circles, each with its
name shown below. There were six pictures on each
screen. Arrows were used to indicate the commands
participants should produce. For example, in Figure 2a,
the arrow points from the cigarette to the lounge chair,
so participants should say: ‘Move the cigarette next to
the lounge chair’. After they produced the instruction,
participants saw a moving event on the computer
screen that responded to the instruction either correctly
or incorrectly. For example, in Figure 2b, the cigarette
is moved next to the lounge chair, which is a correct
response.
To examine discourse-level intonation across lexical
tones, we manipulated the information structure of the
target words and controlled their tonal combinations.
Specifically, a repeated-measures within-subjects design
with two independent variables were used: (1) correctiveness (with two levels: presence or absence of
correction) and (2) givenness (with two levels: new or
given information). Target words were bisyllabic, with
one of the three tonal combinations: HighHigh (HH),
HighLow (HL) or LowHigh (LH). A third of the
target words were HH, a third were HL and a third
were LH. All sentences were produced in the frame
illustrated in (10).3 For instance, the sentence ‘ba
xiangyan (cigarette) fangdao/fangzai tangyi (lounge
chair) pangbian’ would be produced for the display in
Figure 2.
(10) ba OBJECT fang-dao/-zai LOCATION pangbian
BA OBJECT put-PREP
LOCATION side
‘Move the OBJECT next to the LOCATION’
Figure 2.
61
A target word always appeared in the OBJECT role in a
sentence. Table 1 shows the summary of the four
conditions. Target sentences were the last two sentences
in a trial, i.e. the sentences in bold in Table 1. Next, let
us consider the four conditions in more detail.
Broadly speaking, there were two types of target
trials: new-information trials and given-information
trials. The new-information trials were composed of
three spoken instructions (sentence (a), (b) and (c) in
Table 1). First, a participant saw an image with an
arrow and produced the corresponding sentence, e.g.
Move the cigarette next to the lounge chair (sentence
(a)). The object moved correctly in the display, and
after that, another arrow appeared. To convey the information represented by the second arrow, the participant produced another sentence, e.g. Move the juice
next to the crow (sentence (b)). After the second
sentence was uttered, an incorrect object moved to
the location. For example, instead of the juice, the
pacifier moved next to the crow. To correct the moving
event, the participant repeated the instruction, e.g.
Move the JUICE next to the crow (sentence (c)). This
time, the correct object moved on the screen. The
corrective sentence was the last sentence in a trial.
Note that on these new-information trials, the
target word (juice in this case) had not been mentioned
until sentence (b) was uttered for the first time, i.e.
neither of the two nouns mentioned in sentence (a)
(cigarette and lounge chair in this case) was the target
word in sentence (b). Thus, ‘juice’ was new information
when it was mentioned in sentence (b), which we refer
to as the non-corrective new information condition.
Later, when the participant repeated the instruction
in order to correct the incorrect moving event, thus
producing sentence (c), we refer to this as the corrective
new information condition since the target word (juice)
here was uttered in a corrective context. As a result, the
distinction between new and given in this study
is defined from the hearer’s perspective. From the
Sample display.
62
Table 1.
I.C. Ouyang and E. Kaiser
Structure of target trials.
Trial type
Given information
1st sentence
1st visual event
(a) Move A next to B
(Correct moving)
(d) Move A next to TARGET
(Correct moving)
2nd sentence
[Non-corrective new]
(b) Move TARGET next to C
(Wrong object is moved next to C)
[Non-corrective given]
(e) Move TARGET next to C
(Wrong object is moved next to C)
[Corrective new]
(c) Move TARGET next to C
(Correct moving)
[Corrective given]
(f) Move TARGET next to C
(Correct moving)
2nd visual event
3rd sentence
3rd visual event
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New information
perspective of the speaker, by the time they got to
sentence (c), ‘juice’ was already given information
because the speaker had already uttered it in sentence
(b). However, from the perspective of the hearer, ‘juice’
was presumably still new information at the point
where sentence (c) was uttered, since the hearer
apparently did not hear sentence (b) correctly and
moved an incorrect object instead of the ‘juice’. Thus,
the fact that a wrong object was moved implies that the
hearer did not pay attention to sentence (b) and
misheard the object to be moved i.e. it was still new
information to the hearer in sentence (c) (we discuss
this more below).
Having considered the new-information trials, let us
now turn to the given-information trials. The giveninformation trials had the same structure as the newinformation trials, except for the information-structural
properties of the target words. Specifically, in the given
trials, the target word had already been mentioned in
the LOCATION role of the first sentence (sentence (d)
in Table 1). In other words, it had already been involved
in an earlier moving event, as shown in Table 1. Thus,
in the given-information trials, the second spoken
instruction (sentence (e) in Table 1) is in the noncorrective given information condition, and the third
sentence (sentence (f) in Table 1) is in the corrective
given information condition.
In our design, we used the distinction between the
speaker’s perspective and the hearer’s perspective to
differentiate the corrective given and corrective new
conditions. Importantly, there is a considerable body of
work showing that speakers’ prosodic realisations are
indeed sensitive to the hearer’s perspective and attentional state. For example, in instruction-giving tasks
where participants gave instructions to confederates
about where to place objects (e.g. ‘the teapot goes on
red’), longer pronunciations were used for the determiner when the addressees were not anticipating them
(Arnold, Kahn, & Pancani, 2012) and for the object to
be moved when the addressees were multitasking (Rosa,
Finch, Bergeson, & Arnold, 2013). In addition, Ito and
Speer (2006) showed that if the addressee makes a
mistake, the correction by the speaker is produced with
a contrastive accent. Other studies using interactive
designs also found that listener-oriented processes
affect prosodic prominence in the speaker’s output in
various ways (e.g. Lam & Watson, 2010; Watson,
Arnold, & Tanenhaus, 2008a). In addition, corpus
work on word order patterns and non-canonical
constructions (in English and other languages) shows
that people are very sensitive to whether or not
something has been mentioned in preceding discourse/successfully introduced into the discourse model
(e.g. Birner & Ward, 1998, see also Prince, 1992). Based
on these findings, it seems reasonable to assume that
speakers understand that in our corrective new condition, the critical target noun is new to the hearer,
whereas in the corrective given condition, the critical
target noun has already been introduced to the
discourse (and the listener’s mental model of the
discourse) by virtue of being successfully moved after
the first sentence (sentence (d)).
Definition of new/given. It is important to note that
in our design, the distinction between ‘given’ and ‘new’
information is drawn in terms of discourse-status, i.e.
whether the noun has already been mentioned in the
preceding discourse or not (e.g. Birner & Ward, 1998;
Kaiser & Trueswell, 2004; Prince, 1992). Thus, any
entity that has already been mentioned in the prior
discourse, regardless of grammatical position, is by
definition discourse-old/given information. In particular, the target word in the given conditions first occurs
in the LOCATION role and then in the OBJECT role.
Prior work has identified connections between prosodic
cues and discourse-status (e.g. Féry, Kaiser, Hörnig,
Weskott, & Kliegl, 2009 on F0 contours in German) as
well as word order patterns and discourse-status (e.g.
Birner & Ward, 1998 on English). This definition of old
vs. new differs from Terken and Hirschberg (1994) and
Schwarzschild (1999), who note that a change in
syntactic role (and/or surface position) can render
something ‘new’ for purposes of accent assignment.
According to their view, the target nouns in our given
conditions should in fact count as ‘new’ for purposes of
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Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
prosodic prominence because their syntactic role has
changed. However, an eye-tracking study by Dahan,
Tanenhaus, and Chambers (2002) shows that when
listeners hear temporarily ambiguous discourse-old
nouns realised in a new syntactic position with
prosodic prominence, they do not interpret these
prosodic cues as potentially referring to discoursenew referents. In other words, Dahan et al.’s results
suggest that discourse-old entities mentioned again in a
different syntactic position do not pattern in the same
way that discourse-new nouns do, seemingly in contrast
to the claims of Terken and Hirschberg (1994).
Pre-empting our findings somewhat, let us note
already that our results indicate that Mandarin speakers
are indeed sensitive to the given vs. new distinction
defined in terms of discourse-information status and
independently of grammatical role or surface position.
Although the given information manipulation in our
experiment may not represent the ‘highest degree’ of
givenness (due to the change in grammatical role), the
key observation (discussed more in the results section) is
that the difference between our new and given information conditions is reflected in participants’ prosody.
Each condition contained nine items, three in each
of the three tone combinations. (See Appendix for the
list of target words.) There were 18 target trials, each
including a non-corrective target sentence and a corrective target sentence. The dependent variables that we
measured were the duration, F0 range and intensity
range of the target word region in a target sentence. In
the target trials, either three or four of the objects were
mentioned in a particular trial. The extra two to three
pictures in a display were presented to ensure that
participants could not predict which picture was going
to be involved in the next instruction. The experiment
also included 36 filler trials, which differed from the
target trials along one or more of the following
parameters: the number of sentences in a trial, whether
and in which sentence a wrong moving event occurs, on
which noun the correction needs to be made in a
corrective sentence, and the lexical tones of the nouns.
Among all the trials, any two of the nouns cooccurred less than four times, and any three of the
nouns co-occurred less than once in a trial. The tonal
combinations used in target words (HH, HL and LH)
appeared 56 times each, and the tonal combination
which was only used in filler words (LL) appeared 48
times. All the words (i.e. names of the pictures) were
concrete nouns that denoted movable objects and had a
frequency no higher than 15.23 counts per million
according to Cai and Brysbaert (2010). We controlled
for various factors including the number of syllables,
the combination of tones, semantic properties and
word frequency. This placed severe constraints on the
choice of words, and thus voiceless and sibilant
63
consonants in the words could not be entirely avoided.
The positions and directions of arrows on the displays
were counterbalanced across trials.
Procedure and participants
Participants were told to give instructions to move
objects based on the pictures and arrows on the
computer screen, to check whether their instructions
were carried out correctly, and to provide a correction
if their instructions were not followed. They were asked
to only use the sentence frame in (10) during the entire
experiment, and to speak as naturally as possible.
Participants were told to imagine that they were
speaking to a person in another room, in front of
another computer connected to the participants’ computer, and that the listener, who might sometimes get
distracted and make mistakes, would move the objects
according to the participants’ instructions. This was
done in order to make the task as natural as possible;
our assumption was that people would be most likely
to mark information-structural cues in their prosody in
a communicative situation.
Ten adult native speakers of Mandarin, five women
and five men were participated. All were either born in
Beijing or had lived in Beijing since age 13 or younger.
All of them were students or visiting scholars at
University of Southern California who left Beijing no
longer than 2 years before. The participants received
$10 for their participation.
Data analysis
Acoustic analyses were done using the Praat software
with the ProsodyPro script (Xu, 20052011). Duration,
F0 and intensity were extracted by the script. Repeated
measure ANOVAs and paired t-tests were conducted
on the duration, F0 ranges (maximum F0 minus
minimum F0) and intensity ranges (maximum intensity
minus minimum intensity) of target words.4 All ANOVAs presented in this paper had correctiveness (correction or non-correction) and givenness (given or new) as
independent variables. In the by-subject analyses, the
tonal combination of each target word (HH, HL or
LH) was also included as a control variable.5
To make sure that our data or conclusions are not
distorted by the occurrence of creaky voice, we
manually removed the markings for aperiodic pulses
(resulting from irregular vibration of vocal folds)
before the F0 values were computed. This is because
pitch tracking for aperiodic waveforms is often inaccurate, which could potentially impact the analysis of F0,
as low tones prevalently bring about creakiness in
tone languages (e.g. Yoruba: Welmers, 1973, p. 109;
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64
I.C. Ouyang and E. Kaiser
appear in the corrective conditions. The observations
are confirmed by statistical analyses: ANOVAs show a
main effect of correctiveness (F(1,9) 20.020, pB0.01),
with corrective conditions showing significantly longer
duration than non-corrective conditions, and no main
effect of givenness (F(1,9) 2.189, p 0.173). There is a
significant interaction between correctiveness and givenness (F(1,9) 6.260, p B0.05). More specifically,
planned comparisons reveal that the correctiveness
effect on duration occurs in both the new information
conditions (corrective new has longer duration than
non-corrective new: t(9) 4.177, p B0.01) and the
given information conditions (corrective given has
longer duration than non-corrective given: t(9)
4.641, pB0.01), but the givenness effect on duration
emerges only when the words are non-corrective (noncorrective new has longer duration than non-corrective
given: t(9) 3.333, pB0.01) and not when the words
are corrective (corrective new does not differ from
corrective given: t(9)0.331, p 0.748). In sum, while
non-corrective words show an effect of givenness, no
effect of givenness is detected on corrective words.
Cantonese: Vance, 1977; Mandarin: Belotel-Grenié &
Grenié, 1994). To minimise this problem, all of our F0
analyses focus on the non-creaky portions. Since the
minimum F0 in the HL and LH tonal combinations
appears during the low tone component, our data
might not accurately reflect the actual F0 ranges. In a
HL or LH word that contained a creaky region, the
actual minimum F0 could be lower than what was
measured, and if so, the F0 range calculated by
deducting minimum F0 from maximum F0 would be
smaller, and the effects of information structure on F0
ranges would be consequently underestimated. Thus,
creaky voice could potentially obscure effects of
information structure on F0 ranges because it may
cause the ranges to be underestimated. Nevertheless, as
will become clear in the rest of the paper, our results
clearly indicate that F0 ranges do play a significant role
signalling information structure (see the following
subsections). Thus, we do not regard the occurrence
of creaky voice as a problem for our findings, as it did
not obscure the patterns of F0 ranges in this study.
Main results: duration, F0 ranges and intensity ranges
In this section, we first present the results for duration
of target words. Then we turn to F0 and intensity
measures, which we analysed in three different ways: (1)
the range of F0 and intensity measures on the target
words (difference between maximum and minimum on
a given word), (2) the maximum and minimum
measures for F0 and intensity and (3) the mean values
for F0 and intensity on the target word.
F0 ranges
Having considered duration, let us now turn to the
findings for F0 ranges. Overall, F0 ranges show a
similar pattern as duration, as can be seen in Figure 4.
Mirroring the results of duration, words in the
corrective conditions have larger F0 ranges than words
in the non-corrective conditions; given information has
smaller F0 ranges than new information in the noncorrective conditions, but this given/new distinction is
not present in the corrective conditions. These observations are again confirmed statistically: ANOVAs show
a main effect of correctiveness (F(1,9) 22.232, pB
0.01) but no main effect of givenness (F(1,9) 0.749,
p0.409). There is a significant interaction between
correctiveness and givenness (F(1,9) 5.892, pB0.05).
Planned comparisons reveal that the correctiveness
effect on F0 ranges occurs in both the new information
conditions (corrective new has a larger range than
Duration
Overall, as can be seen in Figure 3, words in the
corrective conditions (the two bars on the left) are longer than words in the non-corrective conditions (the
two tall bars on the right). Within the non-corrective
conditions, words that are given information have
shorter durations than words that are new information,
but this distinction between given and new does not
Duration
(ms)
500
450
400
350
300
Corrective
New
Figure 3.
Corrective
Given
NonCorrective NonCorrective
New
Given
Average duration of the target words in each condition (error bars show91 SE).
Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
65
F0 Ranges
(HZ)
80
70
60
50
40
Corrective
New
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Figure 4.
Corrective
Given
NonCorrective NonCorrective
New
Given
Average F0 ranges of the target words in each condition (error bars show91 SE).
non-corrective new: t(9) 3.536, p B0.01) and the
given information conditions (corrective given has a
larger range than non-corrective given: t(9) 5.059,
p B0.01). However, the givenness effect on F0 ranges
emerges only when the words are non-corrective (noncorrective new has a bigger range than non-corrective
given: t(9)3.348, pB0.01) and not when they are
corrective (non-corrective new does not differ from
non-corrective given: t(9) 0.669, p 0.521).
Intensity ranges
Finally, let us move on to the findings for our third
parameter, intensity ranges, shown in Figure 5. Interestingly, the intensity range patterns differ from the
patterns observed for F0 ranges and duration. On one
hand, the distinction between corrective and noncorrective conditions remains: words in the corrective
conditions have larger intensity ranges than words in
the non-corrective conditions. However, new information does not differ from given information on intensity
ranges, in either the corrective or non-corrective
conditions. ANOVAs show a main effect of correctiveness (F(1,9) 9.659, pB0.05). There is no main effect
of givenness (F(1,9) 0.130, p 0.727) and no interaction between correctiveness and givenness (F(1,9) 0.563, p 0.472).
Further analyses of F0 and intensity ranges: F0 and
intensity maxima and minima
In contrast to prior work where the distinction between
correction and new information was only found in one
prosodic dimension (duration in Greif, 2010; F0 ranges
in Chen & Braun, 2006), the results presented in the
preceding sections show that corrective focus and newinformation focus differ in all three prosodic dimension. However, in order to better understand the
underlying nature of the F0 and intensity ranges,
further analyses are needed. As mentioned in the
‘aims’ section, F0 ranges or intensity ranges are not a
single parameter in and of themselves. To understand
how F0 and intensity ranges are altered acoustically, we
need to examine their ‘components’ the maxima and
minima of F0 and intensity. Inspecting the maxima and
minima allows us to see how range expansion is
accomplished, e.g. (1) by raising the maximum, (2)
lowering the minimum or (3) both? (Figure 1). We aim
to answer two questions: First, are F0 range expansion
and intensity range expansion achieved in the same
way? Second, do new-information focus and contrastive focus involve different ‘strategies’ of range expansion for either F0 or intensity? In this section, we
present the results of maximum and minimum F0, and
maximum and minimum intensity.
Intensity Ranges
(dB)
23
21
19
17
15
Corrective
New
Figure 5.
Corrective
Given
NonCorrective NonCorrective
New
Given
Average intensity ranges of the target words in each condition (error bars show91 SE).
66
I.C. Ouyang and E. Kaiser
Max & Min F0
(Hz)
230
Max
Min
210
190
170
150
130
Corrective
New
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Figure 6.
Corrective
Given
NonCorrective NonCorrective
New
Given
Average maximum and minimum F0 of the target words in each condition (error bars show91 SE).
Maximum and minimum F0
Breaking F0 ranges down into maximum and minimum F0, we see that different types of information
structure enlarge F0 ranges through different means.
As shown in Figure 6, words in the corrective conditions have overall higher maximum F0 and lower
minimum F0 than words in the non-corrective conditions in other words, the increased F0 range that we
observe for correction is accomplished by both raising the
maximum and lowering the minimum. Taking a closer
look at the conditions, we see that the corrective given
and corrective new conditions do not differ from each
other in terms of their F0 maxima or minima (jt(9)js B
0.643, p’s0.536). However, when we look at the noncorrective conditions, we see that non-corrective given
and non-corrective new differ in terms of their maximum F0 (higher for new information) but not in terms
of their minimum F0. Thus, the F0 range expansion that
we reported above for words that are new information in
non-corrective contexts is accomplished by raising the
maximum F0 without changing the minimum F0.
The statistical analyses confirm these observations
to a large extent. ANOVAs show a main effect of
correctiveness on maximum F0 (F(1,9) 27.844, pB
0.01) and minimum F0 (F(1,9) 7.415, pB0.05), with
maximum F0 being significantly higher and minimum
F0 significantly lower in the corrective words than the
non-corrective words. Somewhat unexpectedly, there is
no significant interaction between correctiveness and
givenness in either maximum F0 (F(1,9) 2.994, p
0.118) or minimum F0 (F(1,9) 0.802, p0.394).
Nevertheless, given and new information in the noncorrective conditions differ in maximum F0 by 5 Hz,
which is in magnitude the same as the statistically
significant difference in minimum F0 between corrective and non-corrective words.
Maximum and minimum intensity
Turning now to the question of intensity ranges, we
find a very different pattern: in contrast to F0,
maximum intensity stays the same among different
types of information structure, as indicated in Figure 7.
The presence and absence of correction is reflected only
in minimum intensity: minimum intensity is lower in
corrective words than non-corrective words. ANOVAs
show a main effect of correctiveness on minimum
intensity (F(1,9) 9.013, pB0.05) but not on maximum intensity (F(1,9) 0.059, p0.813). Consistent
with the patterns of intensity ranges, there is no
interaction between correctiveness and givenness in
Max & Min Intensity
(dB)
Max
80
Min
75
70
65
60
55
50
Figure 7.
Corrective
New
Corrective
Given
NonCorrective NonCorrective
New
Given
Average maximum and minimum intensity of the target words in each condition (error bars show91 SE).
Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
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either minimum intensity (F(1,9) 1.119, p0.318) or
maximum intensity (F(1,9) 0.802, p 0.394).
In sum, we find that the intensity range expansion
for F0 and for intensity is accomplished in different
ways, with intensity range expansion accomplished
simply by lowering the minimum intensity and F0
range expansion showing a more complex pattern: the
F0 range expansion observed for corrective focus is
accomplished by both raising the maximum and lowering the minimum, whereas the F0 range expansion
observed for non-corrective new-information focus is
accomplished by raising the maximum F0 without
changing the minimum F0.
Mean F0 and mean intensity
Having inspected the ranges of F0 and intensity and
their maxima and minima, we now look at the means
of F0 and intensity. In the preceding section, we saw
that only in some contexts did range expansion involve
both raising maxima and lowering minima (i.e. F0
range expansion for corrective focus). In other contexts
where the ranges were expanded by only raising the
maxima (i.e. F0 range expansion for new-information
focus) or only lowering minima (i.e. intensity range
expansion for new-information focus), means could
potentially also reflect information-structure. Somewhat surprisingly, mean F0 and mean intensity do not
robustly differ between information-structural types.
Despite a main effect of correctiveness on mean F0
(F(1,9) 12.244, pB0.01), the difference in mean F0 is
significant only between the given information conditions (i.e. corrective given is significantly higher than
non-corrective given: t(9)4.307, p B0.01) but marginal between the new information conditions (i.e. corrective new is marginally higher than non-corrective new:
t(9)1.858, p 0.096). There is no main effect of
givenness on mean F0 (F(1,9) 0.616, p0.453).
Also, neither correctiveness (F(1,9) 0.110, p 0.748)
nor givenness (F(1,9) 0.486, p 0.503) has a main
effect on mean intensity.
In sum, we find that unlike ranges, maxima and
minima means of F0 and intensity do not provide
reliable cues about information status in Mandarin.
This finding highlights the importance of a comprehensive analysis of prosodic features; in our case, the
major cues for information-structural distinctions
would have been overlooked if one had only analysed
the means of F0 and intensity.
Results regarding lexical tone combinations
As mentioned in the design section, we used bisyllabic
target words in one of three lexical tonal combinations:
67
HH, HL or LH. These tonal combinations were
equally distributed among the target words and the
different conditions, to ensure that our conclusions
would not be restricted to a single tonal combination
type. Because we controlled for factors such as word
frequency and semantic properties, the identity of the
segments in target words was not controlled across
tonal combinations. This means that prosodic differences between tonal combinations may come from
segmental variance rather than tonal properties. Thus,
any comparison between tonal combinations must be
viewed cautiously. The analyses in this section are
included for the sake of completeness, but the reader
should keep in mind that these are post-hoc analyses
and the study was not designed with these analyses in
mind (due to the variability in the segmental properties
of the target words).
When we look at the prosodic features within each
tonal combination, we see that the majority of the
patterns discussed in the results section emerges within
each tonal combination as well. We first consider the
corrective vs. non-corrective manipulation, and then
the given vs. new manipulation.
Corrective vs. non-corrective manipulation
Paired t-tests were conducted comparing corrective
new vs. non-corrective new for all three tonal combinations, and corrective given vs. non-corrective given for
all three tonal combinations. Overall, the effects of
correctiveness in both new and given information that
we observed in the preceding sections appear in all
tonal combinations, although some of them do not
reach significance. The absence of significance is not
surprising, given (1) the fact that identity of the
segments in target words was not controlled across
tonal combinations and (2) the reduction in power that
comes from looking at a third of the entire dataset
(since there are three tonal combinations), and even
less when we split it into given vs. new and corrective vs.
non-corrective. Nonetheless, the distribution of significance among the conditions shows compatible patterns
with prior work that examines the dependence of focusdriven prosody on lexical tones (Chen & Gussenhoven,
2008). In fact, while all tonal combinations are
significantly lengthened in corrective focus, only the
HL combination robustly differs in the F0 and
intensity dimensions between corrective and noncorrective conditions. The properties of tones seem to
impose greater restrictions on LH and HH, than on
HL, in terms of the extent to which F0 and intensity
can be altered to encode information structure (see
Chen & Gussenhoven, 2008 for relevant further
discussion).
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68
I.C. Ouyang and E. Kaiser
Duration: corrective words are longer (t(9)s3.707,
p’sB0.01) in all tonal combinations than non-corrective words. F0 ranges: corrective words have larger F0
ranges (t(9)s2.659, p’sB0.05) than non-corrective
words (except corrective new vs. non-corrective new
in LH, which is marginal, p0.083, and corrective new
vs. non-corrective new in HH which is ns). Intensity
ranges: corrective words have larger intensity ranges
than non-corrective words (t(9)s 2.599, p’s B0.05;
except for corrective given vs. non-corrective given in
LH which is marginal, p0.057, and corrective new vs.
non-corrective new in HH which is ns). F0 maxima:
corrective words have higher F0 maxima than noncorrective words (t(9)s2.986, p’sB0.05, except for
corrective new vs. corrective given in LH which is ns).
F0 minima: corrective words have numerically lower F0
minima than non-corrective words (ns). Intensity maxima: corrective words have numerically higher intensity
maxima (corrective new vs. non-corrective new and
corrective given vs. non-corrective given for HH reach
significance, p’sB0.05). Intensity minima: corrective
words have lower intensity minima (t(9)s B2.522,
p’sB0.05; except for corrective new vs. non-corrective
new LH which is marginal, p 0.052, and corrective
new vs. non-corrective new HH which is ns).
Given vs. new manipulation
Paired t-tests were conducted comparing corrective
new vs. corrective given for all three tonal combinations, and non-corrective new vs. non-corrective given
for all three tonal combinations. Numerically, the
prosodic properties of the three tonal combinations
largely mirror the data pattern presented in the
preceding section, although the analyses do not reach
significance6, which as discussed above for the
corrective manipulation is not surprising. The descriptive statistics are largely consistent with our previous
observations: within a tonal combination, most of the
numerical differences between non-corrective new and
non-corrective given conditions are towards the same
tendencies as tested in the main analyses.
Discussion
The study presented in this paper investigates the
prosodic cues for two kinds of distinctions between
discourse-information structures in Beijing Mandarin:
the presence or absence of corrective focus, and the new
vs. given distinction. Although existing findings on
Mandarin prosody generally agree that new-information
focus and corrective focus both involve increases in F0
displacement and duration (relative to given words or
words in broad focus), there is as of yet no consensus
about whether and how the two focus types new-
information focus and corrective focus differ from
each other. The role of intensity is also not well
understood. A better understanding of these issues is
important because they are involved in fundamental
questions regarding the relationship of information
structure and prosody, such as how the prosodic system
represents different information-structural categories
and lexical contrasts at the same time. In this section,
we discuss how our results relate to our three key aims
sketched out at the start of the paper, as well as their
broader implications.
Our first aim was to investigate whether words in
new-information focus vs. corrective focus differ from
each other in terms of their prosodic realisation in
Mandarin, and if so, which parameters (e.g. duration,
mean F0, F0 range or intensity) encode these differences. Our second aim was to explore whether and how
the distinction between ‘new’ and ‘given’ influences
the acoustic realisation of both corrective and noncorrective words.
As regards the first aim, our results suggest that the
cues for corrective focus do differ from those signalling
the new vs. given distinction. Corrective focus and newinformation focus are distinguished from each other
both by the degrees of prominence they induce along
the same acoustic dimensions and by the different
acoustic dimensions they occupy. On one hand, corrective focus and new-information focus both affect duration and F0, but corrective focus has a stronger impact
on these prosodic features than new-information
focus. On the other hand, intensity cues only appear
for corrective focus, not for new-information focus.
Despite the fact that we did not focus on the same
kinds of information-structural distinctions, our findings are consistent with Chen and Braun (2006) on the
conceptual level. This indicates the full complexity of
prosodic structure that allows many informationstructural categories to be encoded distinctively.
As regards the second aim, we found that the
prosodic distinction between new and given information only emerged in non-corrective words in our study.
There are several possible reasons for why correctively
focused words do not show a distinction between given
and new. Cognitively, correction might be more salient
than ‘newness’ (Kaiser, 2011), which could in some
sense ‘overwhelm’ the distinction between new and
given information in a context where the words are also
corrective. In principle, such a ‘ceiling effect’ could also
be caused by physiological constraints. Since correction
yields extremely strong prosodic prominence even when
the information is given, it might be difficult or
inefficient to further increase the prominence for new
information. However, a prior study has found duration lengthening for corrective focus in two different
emphatic degrees (Chen & Gussenhoven, 2008). This
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Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
suggests that physiology is unlikely to be hindering the
prosodic realisation of different degrees of emphasis
(for related work on speech perception, see Ladd &
Morton, 1997).
Another explanation is that speakers in our experiment might define givenness from their own perspective
(rather than from the hearer’s perspective as intended),
which would then effectively remove the distinction
between new and given in the corrective focus conditions in our experiment. More specifically, recall that
target sentences in the corrective conditions had been
uttered by the speaker, although the listener apparently
did not hear them properly the first time. If speakers
fail to keep a log of the listener’s knowledge state, then
the prosodic differences between new and given information in non-corrective conditions might actually
reflect whether the words had been uttered more than
once, rather than whether the listener had heard the
words (Lam & Watson, 2010; Watson et al., 2008a).
Lastly, as discussed in the method section, existing
work has shown that given information is prosodically
prominent when it appears in a different syntactic role
(Schwarzschild, 1999; Terken & Hirschberg, 1994). In
our study, a target word in the given-information
conditions first occurs in the LOCATION role and
then in the OBJECT role. Although we did find
prosodic differences between given information and
new information when there is no correction, the
degree of givenness might not be large enough for
given information to be substantially de-accented in
corrective focus due to the change in syntactic roles.
These are intriguing questions that deserve to be
investigated further in future work.
Our third aim was to provide a more inclusive
analysis of the acoustic parameters relevant to information structure, including analysis of intensity as well
as a closer look at how F0 range and intensity
expansion is accomplished (e.g. lowering minima,
raising maxima or both). Regarding intensity, our
results show that it can provide information-structural
cues, though to a limited extent: while contrastive focus
results in increased intensity range expansion, newinformation focus does not do so.
Regarding range expansion, we found that intensity
range expansion for F0 and for intensity were accomplished via multiple routes. As illustrated in Figure 1,
the two parameters involved in the expansion of ranges
maximum and minimum potentially form three
ways of achieving range expansion: (1) raising the
maximum and lowering the minimum, (2) only raising
the maximum and (3) only lowering the minimum.
Intuitively, one might expect that extending both the
upper and lower bound of a range (option (a)) would
require the least articulatory effort while accomplishing
the largest range expansion, so this pattern might be
69
the most widely used. However, analyses of the
production data from our experiment reveal that both
maximum and minimum were employed, and all three
possible ways of expanding ranges emerged in different
portions of our data. Recall that F0 ranges were extended for both corrective focus and new-information
focus, whereas intensity ranges were extended only for
corrective focus. We found that corrective focus expands
F0 ranges by raising the maximum and lowering the
minimum (option (a)), new-information focus expands
F0 ranges by only raising the maximum (option (b)),
and corrective focus expands intensity ranges by only
lowering the minimum (option (c)). Our findings rule
out a simple hypothesis that the semantically or
pragmatically prominent words are merely spoken
slower, louder and with higher pitch. Indeed, the
duration of the words does become longer, but F0
range expansion during a focused word results from
extending not only the upper bound but also the lower
bound of the range. Moreover, the expansion of
intensity ranges is due to a decrease in intensity during
some part of the word, rather than an increase.
In earlier work, Chen and Gussenhoven (2008)
found that the expansion of F0 ranges for information
structure in Mandarin is mainly accomplished by
raising maximum F0, which is somewhat inconsistent
with our findings. As pointed out by Chen and
Gussenhoven (2008), this might have to do with the
fact that F0 lowering in a low lexical tone leads to
serious creakiness, which makes it difficult to assess the
effect of emphasis on F0 minimum. In the section on
‘Results regarding lexical tone combinations’, our
analyses of F0 minimum also show no significant
difference between information-structural conditions
within a tonal combination. However, a possibility that
cannot be excluded is that the cues for range expansion
do not necessarily exist at both sides of the range; we
leave the question open for future work.
Let us now briefly consider the fact that in a tone
language like Mandarin, discourse-level intonation and
lexical tones potentially occupy the same acoustic
dimensions in tone languages. Existing work on
Mandarin has found that all three prosodic dimensions
duration, F0 and intensity provide cues for
discourse-level information, as well as make contrasts
(i.e. lexical tones) between word meanings. Largely
consistent with prior studies (Chen, 2006; Chen &
Braun, 2006; Chen & Gussenhoven, 2008; Greif, 2010;
Jin, 1996; Xu, 1999)7, we found lengthening and F0
range expansion in corrective focus and new-information
focus. Furthermore, our results show that intensity
ranges may also be expanded to emphasise words in an
utterance: intensity excursions become larger when the
speakers express a correction. In other words, there is
no evidence for specialised functions where some
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70
I.C. Ouyang and E. Kaiser
prosodic dimensions mark information structure and
others mark lexical items, e.g. it is not the case that
intensity ranges are used to mark only lexical contrasts,
whereas F0 ranges are used to mark only informationstructural distinctions. All three prosodic dimensions
are multi-functional.
Our findings are also compatible with earlier
observations regarding the manner in which prosodic
cues in Mandarin encode discourse-information structure and lexical distinctions in particular, the idea
that these two kinds of information are encoded
differently: the latter has to do with the shapes of F0
movement and intensity movement, and the former
with the ranges of their movement. Earlier work has
pointed out that, for different lexical tones, the shapes
of F0 contours clearly differ, whereas with informationstructural types, what vary are the ranges of F0
contours (Chen & Gussenhoven, 2008; Xu, 1997).
Whalen and Xu (1992) suggest that F0 and intensity
are positively correlated in lexical tones, which enables
Mandarin speakers to perceive tones without the
presence of contrastive F0 patterns. Indeed, if one
inspects the contours of F0 and intensity in our data,
both their shapes considerably differ between tonal
combinations while staying similar across different
conditions of information structure. Given our results
showing that intensity ranges are used to differentiate
information-structural types, there appear to be parallels between F0 and intensity in the specialisation of
parameters. Lexical information is encoded by the
shapes of F0 and intensity contours, whereas discourse
information is marked by the ranges of F0 excursions
and, as indicated by our findings, the ranges of
intensity excursions. This highlights the fine-grained
ability of the language production system to utilise
different aspects of acoustic dimensions.
Conclusions
On the basis of the production study reported in this
paper, we can draw two main conclusions. First, our
findings provide further evidence for the multifunctionality of acoustic-prosodic dimensions. Even in
a language with lexical tones, which differ in F0,
intensity and duration, all these dimensions nevertheless also encode information structure (see also
Chen & Gussenhoven, 2008). Nevertheless, since the
shapes of F0 and intensity contours mark lexical items
(Whalen & Xu, 1992), these two prosodic dimensions
are modulated in another way to mark discourse
importance. Parallel to what has been found in F0,
the ranges of which provide cues for focus (e.g. Jin,
1996), our results clearly show that the ranges of
intensity encode discourse information as well. Second,
not only can prosodic cues indicate discourse importance, they also distinguish different kinds of information-structural distinctions in Mandarin (see also Chen
& Braun, 2006). Lengthening and F0 range expansion
occur in both corrective focus and new-information
focus, whereas intensity range expansion only appears
on correctively-focused words, regardless of their
givenness. Taken together, our results show that even
in a tone language where the dimensions of F0,
duration and intensity are used to mark lexical
distinctions prosodic information is nevertheless a
rich source of cues about information structure,
including different subtypes of focus. Our findings
highlight the fine-grained ability of the language
production system to utilise different aspects of acoustic dimensions with great efficiency.
Acknowledgements
Earlier version of this work were presented at AMLaP
(Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing) 2011, ETAP (Experimental and Theoretical
Advances in Prosody) 2, WECOL (Western Conference
on Linguistics) 2011 and the Annual Meeting of the
Linguistic Society of America in 2012; we would like to
thank the audience members for the valuable comments and suggestions. Thanks also go to the USC
Language Processing Lab group for feedback during
the development of this project. We would also like to
thank the editors of ‘Language and Cognitive Processes’ and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful
comments.
Notes
1.
2.
Greif (2010) compared narrow new-information focus
with two types of corrective focus: semantic correction
and pragmatic correction. Due to length reasons, we will
not discuss Greif (2010)’s findings for what he calls
‘pragmatic correction’, since only semantic correction is
similar to the corrective focus that we investigated.
Chen and Braun (2006)’s study is important, as it is the
first prosodic investigation of information structure
in Mandarin that investigated different informationstructural categories in a way that closely tied them to
theoretical work. Their information-structural notions
and terminology are based on Steedman (2000): Theme,
Rheme, Background and Focus. In our discussion, we
refer to their ‘normal rheme focus’ and ‘corrective rheme
focus’ as ‘narrow focus’ and ‘corrective focus’ for the
sake of consistency. More specifically, Chen and Braun
(2006) examine four categories of discourse information:
theme background, theme focus, rheme background and
rheme focus. Following Steedman (2000)’s framework,
these four categories are based on two layers of
information structure: a primary distinction between
rheme and theme, and a secondary distinction between
focus and background. While ‘rheme’ and ‘theme’
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Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
roughly correspond to the new and given information as
defined in our study, the division between ‘focus’ and
‘background’ is based on prosody focus is intonationally marked and background is not. Chen and Braun
(2006) find that both rheme and focus are marked by
lengthening and F0 range expansion, and that the
distinction between rheme and theme is prosodically
more prominent than the distinction between focus and
background. Additionally, and most relevantly for us they look into two subtypes of rheme focus (essentially,
new-information focus and corrective focus), and find that
correctively-focused rhemes have bigger F0 ranges than
non-correctively-focused rhemes, but do not differ in
duration a finding which contrasts with Greif (2010).
As a whole, Chen and Braun (2006)’s findings suggest
that different information-structural distinctions can be
encoded in the same prosodic dimensions with different
degrees of prominence, as well as reflected in different
prosodic dimensions.
For the verb ‘put’, the variant fang is also possible, in
addition to fang-dao and fang-zai. These forms are
interchangeable across speakers in this context. Participants were asked to use the one most natural to them;
only one participant used the short form fang.
Three sentences are missing from the recordings due to
technical problems, and two sentences were misspoken.
They amount to 1.39% of the data.
In this paper, we focus on the by-subject analyses because
the design of the study does not allow for by-item
analyses of all targets, as the nine target words were
‘cycled’ through the 36 target items. However, if one
analyses the nine target words in all four conditions, the
statistical patterns closely resemble the by-subject analyses.
The analysis comparing given vs. new words in the noncorrective condition do not reach significance, except for
the analysis of intensity range: for words in the HH tone
group, non-corrective new information has a larger
intensity range than non-corrective given information
(t(9)2.519, p B0.05).
For corrective focus, Chen and Braun (2006) did not find
lengthening and Greif (2010) did not find F0 range
expansion, as discussed in the introduction.
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Appendix 1. Target words
Tone
HH (highhigh)
HL (highlow)
LH (lowhigh)
Word
xiang.yan
wu.ya
qing.wa
qiu.yin
ying.wu
ban.ma
gui.wu
yu.yi
hai.ou
‘cigarette’
‘crow’
‘frog’
‘earthworm’
‘parrot’
‘zebra’
‘ghost house’
‘raincoat’
‘seagull’